One final aspect of our knowledge of words has nothing to do with any of the factors considered so far. We know which words tend to occur with other words. If you ask a Semantics 121 thousand people what they think of when you say hammer, more than half will say nail. If you say table, they’ll mostly say chair, and butter elicits bread, needle elicits thread and salt elicits pepper. One way we seem to organize our knowledge of words is simply on the basis of collocation, or frequently occurring together.

In recent years, the study of which words occur together and their frequency of cooccurrence has received a lot more attention in corpus linguistics. A corpus is a large collection of texts, spoken or written, typically stored as a database in a computer. Those doing corpus linguistics can then use the database to find out how often specific words or phrases occur and what types of collocations are most common.

One investigation looked at 84 occurrences of the phrase true feelings in a corpus (only a small sample is shown here). After looking at the types of verbs (e.g. deny, try to communicate) used with this phrase, the investigator noted that “English speakers use the phrase with true feelings when they want to give the meaning of reluctance to express deeply felt emotions”